Death by a thousand cuts*

I was faced with one of life's egregious little cunteries a couple of days ago. I can't even remember what it was. I remember it offended my libertarian sensitivities and I thought, "I'd like to tear that down. I'd like to hound those fuckers into the grave."

And then I thought, if I did this, what would it gain me? As it turned out, it would have been about 20 or 30 quid a year. It would have saved every other taxpayer in the country 20 or 30 quid as well, but the mere thought of trying to convince them all to spend 20 minutes for that money was too horrifying for words, especially because 90% of them would probably have wondered why I was advocating strangling kittens or something.

So I just gave up. It wasn't worth it to me. It would have been worth 600 or 900 million quid to the country as a whole, the thick end of a billion quid ripped out of the hands of feckless, unaccountable bastards and firmly wedged back into our own wallets for beer or fags or drugs or whatever.

But the problem is this: there are only about 1500 feckless, unaccountable bastards using that 600 or 900 million quid. These are 1500 people who already work for the same organisation, who are all lorded over by the same fuckwit, who have a very good reason to ensure that awkward bastards like me don't just piss all over their budget. It's much easier to mobilise 1,500 ignorant fucks than it is to mobilise 32,000,000 ignorant fucks. And those 1,500 ignorant fucks have their jobs on the line. So of course, they're going to fight like motherfuckers. Whereas the rest of us, well, we're fighting for 20 or 30 quid. How hard would you fight for 20 or 30 quid? I probably wouldn't fight at all.

Even though "society" would benefit hugely overall from having 1,500 fewer interfering, hectoring, nannying arsebandits sticking their fucking noses into some aspect of our lives, never mind the aggregated benefit of depriving the grasping state of the thick end of a billion quid and never mind the aggregated benefit of us spending the thick end of a billion quid on something that we really want, rather than "inclusive diversity outreach co-ordinators", I just couldn't be bothered, because at the end of the day, it's 20 or 30 quid.

That's the problem that we're faced with: hundreds or thousands of 10 quid, 20 quid, 30 quid irritations. They're petty irritations to you, there's too many of them and no individual one is worth the arseache. However, for the occupants of that bit of hectoring or nannying or bullying, their livelihood is at stake.

And that's why we never get rid of all these fucking government "initiatives" or programs. People get employed and when their job is done, they don't think "what will I do next?" They think "How can I stretch this out?"

The only solution to this is to starve the government of funds. Do every legal thing you can to keep your money in your back pocket. Do your tax return with ruthless accuracy. Don't let the fuckers get a penny more than you're legally obliged to give them. Try to find legal ways of buying things to keep money out of the government's coffers - like buying fags in France or Spain. Fuck this bunch of spendthrift knobjockeys sideways.

If we all take just an extra 200 quid home at the end of the tax year, we'll have done more to cunt up government spending than any of the big three parties are promising.

Do your duty.

Update: The UK Libertarian has an excellent video on this and more, here.

*My fingers typed "Death by a thousand cunts" all by themselves. And it is a perfectly valid title, but I went with this instead.